I Can't Believe YouTube is Doing This (Big Update)

So there's some breaking news right now on YouTube that just happened, and honestly, I've never seen such a massive shift happen all at once during my past 10 years on YouTube. These are not just minor updates or like a little feature rollout. These are going to change how the entire economy on YouTube, so to speak, works. And this isn't just going to be another YouTube update video. I've made a couple of those on some updates that YouTube has talked about on some of my last videos. I wasn't planning on doing another one, but then all of a sudden YouTube drops this because they just had a Made on YouTube event where essentially they They invited a bunch of the top creators and then announced a bunch of these changes. Now sadly, I wasn't invited, but I have been doing YouTube for the past 10 years, so I can break down what these changes actually practically mean for you or anybody else running YouTube channels, especially faceless channels, but even any type of channel is gonna really benefit from hearing how these changes break down and how you can actually use some of them to your benefit and how some of the changes might be a little bit controversial as well. Also, the thing about these changes is that it's not just like a little update that's gonna come in 6 months or a year or something. A lot of times YouTube comes out and they tell us they're gonna do something in 6 months, in a year. This is stuff that's actually being implemented right now and features that are rolling out right now, which means YouTube has been planning a lot of these things in the background for a bit of time, but now they're actually releasing them to the public. So I think it's really important that we talk about them and I break them down for you so you can see these changes from the perspective of someone who runs a bunch of different channels themselves and has been doing it for the past 10 years. Some people are panicking about these. A lot of people are just honestly confused. But if you're smart about these changes, you really should be asking yourself, how can I profit from them? And that's exactly what I'm gonna attempt to show you today. So I wanna start with one of the most significant changes because this is going to transform how content is created on YouTube forever. YouTube just integrated Google's DeepMind V03 directly into YouTube Shorts creation. And let me explain to you what this means. You can now create AI video clips and backgrounds with sound completely for free within YouTube, not using some external AI tool, not paying for an expensive software, directly in YouTube Shorts. Now, so many people have been coming to me and saying, Matt, AI is not allowed on YouTube, but YouTube is trying to crack down on AI content. And yes, they have been on some type of content that hasn't been giving value to people. But as I've been saying on this channel now for a few months, YouTube is owned by Google and Google owns one of the biggest AI video creation tools available, which is Google Veo. So you have to ask yourself, is YouTube really going to crack down on AI content like crazy? Absolutely not. They're going to use their tool, which as evidence they're doing, to integrate Google Veo directly into YouTube. But that's not even the crazy part. The new features that are being powered by Veo will allow you to add motion, for example, to static images. Restyle existing videos, even add props to scenes. And here's the kicker, there's a new feature called Edit with AI that will take your raw footage and literally edit it all together and turn it into a first draft video. Do you understand how massive that is? We are entering a time where maybe it's not perfect right now, but in the very short future, conceivably it will be. Eventually we could have our full YouTube videos edited by YouTube itself. Now obviously it might take a little bit of time to get there. These tools are only for YouTube Shorts right now. So at this point you might be saying, "Matt, that sounds great, but what does this actually mean for my channel?" What this means is not exactly what you think it means. Because while some people are just gonna rush and they're gonna generate tons of these AI-generated videos, they're gonna be really low quality. It's gonna flood YouTube with these AI videos with generic, soulless, lack-of-personality videos. And sure, a couple might pop off, a couple might get views, but even if they get views, this is with YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts is not where it's at when it comes to making money from YouTube. The real money is in long-form content with how I teach on this channel and running a real business with YouTube. So all this low-quality AI spam that's coming to YouTube creates what I'm calling the AI paradox, which is that the same tools that help you create amazing content can also be used to create spam that gets your channel terminated. So the question becomes, how can you use AI or use these powerful AI tools and now features directly integrated with YouTube without falling into the spam trap? Well, based on my experience of what I'm seeing from some of my most successful students in my community, here's the secret. AI should enhance your content but not replace your entire strategy. The creators who are going to win with these changes are going to use these like the tools that they are to enhance what they're already doing and the strategy they're already putting into YouTube. If you are doing what I teach with having a long-form video that you push all of your content to, including all of your Shorts, which you can, by the way, add a long-form video as a related video on those Shorts and then push all of your shorts videos to that and create actual content that aligns with your entire brand strategy and your entire YouTube strategy, then it fits into your overall channel. It matches your brand voice and it serves your audience needs, which of course means that you're providing value to your end viewer, which is what YouTube cares about. So you won't fall into the spam bucket, but on top of that, it'll actually help your content a lot as well. So link all of your shorts if you generate any with AI. Make sure to generate stuff that gives value and then link them all to a super long-form video, which I like to call a pillar video, in which you sell something at the end of it, ideally an affiliate product or even your own product. That way you're building a business off of this as well. Now the next update is what I'm calling the Evergreen Content Revolution, and it's going to make certain types of channels incredibly valuable overnight. So YouTube is introducing this thing, it's called Swappable Sponsor Blocks, and if you understand what this means, you're about to realize why some channels just became way more valuable as business assets. So here's how it works. You can now create videos where the sponsored content in those videos can be swapped out without having to re-upload or edit the entire video. You might be thinking, "Matt, that's great, but how is that revolutionary?" Let me explain why this changes everything. Right now, if you create a sponsored video, that sponsorship is permanently baked into the content. If you wanna change sponsors, you have to create entirely new content. And this means that sponsored content has a very limited lifespan from a monetization perspective. You get paid once for it. But with swappable sponsor blocks, evergreen content becomes incredibly powerful. And I've been talking about evergreen content for years on this channel because I still get paid from videos that I've uploaded back when I was 14 years old, but I'm only getting paid from ad revenue. Imagine I had swappable sponsor blocks where I could swap out the sponsors on those particular videos and now make even more money on a consistent basis from them. You can continually monetize with new sponsors over months or even years. And here's a concrete example of why this matters. Let's say that you created a comprehensive tutorial about how to use Excel for beginners. Under the old system, let's say you find a sponsor and it's some productivity app. That video would make money from one sponsor. But with swappable sponsorship blocks, that same evergreen tutorial that will get views for years into the future could be monetized with dozens of different relevant sponsors over time. Productivity apps, online courses, software tools, business services, the list goes on. And here's where this gets really interesting from a business perspective, in my opinion. This update doesn't just change how individual videos make money, it fundamentally changes the value of YouTube channels as business assets. If you own a channel with a library of evergreen content that can continually be remonetized with new sponsors, you're not just owning a YouTube channel anymore, you're owning a media property that can generate revenue indefinitely on top of just the ad revenue. So if you run, let's say, like a network of channels, especially in related niches, like let's say you have a bunch of different productivity channels or a bunch of entrepreneurship channels, personal finance, marketing, business tools, With these swappable sponsor blocks, you could offer sponsorship package deals across all of the different channels within your network, rotating their messaging throughout your network. You might be saying, Matt, you haven't really talked much about sponsorships on channels. Like, why does this matter that much? Well, this changes things a little bit because now you don't just make money from one sponsor. You can, you know, continually remonetize your content, so to speak. So I think sponsorships are going to become a lot more prevalent. And not only that, I would actually recommend it for a lot of people. To consider finding some sponsors for their channels as their channels grow. Of course, you can even make monthly deals with people to sponsor your channels. Now, sponsorships are not the best way of monetizing your channels. Admittingly, sponsorships will typically come once your channel is a little bit bigger. You've got at least a few thousand subscribers and you are within a single niche that companies like to sponsor, and like some of the niches that I listed earlier. But first and foremost, always monetize with either selling your own product or an affiliate product due to the fact that you'll likely make so much more money. Now let's talk about a change that might seem small, but it's actually huge. Like, this is one of the biggest changes that I wished was on YouTube back when I started, that if you're starting YouTube now, you're so lucky to have access to, which is the enhanced A/B testing capabilities. And you need to be using this if you're running a channel. YouTube is now allowing creators to not only split test 3 thumbnails per video, which they've allowed for quite some time now, and you should be using it if you create thumbnails for your videos, create a couple different variations, you can split test them. YouTube has already had that. What they've just announced is that now they're expanding it to also include titles. So now you can go into your videos that have already been uploaded, go to edit the titles and edit the actual video in your YouTube Studio, and then split test multiple different variations of a title. And then YouTube will show all those different variations, collect the data on which one converts the best in terms of getting people to click, just like they do with thumbnails. And then it'll choose the best title. So I mean, you've probably experienced it where you come up with like a couple different title ideas for your video and you're not sure which one to do, so you just choose one of them out of randomness. But now you can just let YouTube do the work for you and split test multiple different ones. Now unfortunately, it's not rolled out to everybody yet. I see some of my channels have it, but some of them don't. Like there's a little button that says A/B test next to the ones that do have it in the YouTube Studio when you're editing a video, but a lot of my channels don't have it yet. So I think they're still rolling this one out a little bit, but I cannot wait until it's rolled out to everybody. So the title split testing is great, but YouTube also just announced that creators can now add 5 different collaborators to a single video. So basically what this means is that if you collaborate with another YouTube channel, let's say you make a video for them, so they're getting a free video out of it and then you can get some extended reach. What's awesome now is that they're not just going to put a link in the description going to your channel. Now it'll actually show your channel along with the subscribe button because they can allow you to be a collaborator on that channel, and then you can accept that, and there will be a direct subscribe button directly to your channel. And then they can actually choose to show you the analytics for that video as well. And also, this piece of content could be shared on multiple people's channels, which creates kind of a multiplication effect for it. So you could have pieces of content going super viral because multiple different creators collaborate. And send traffic to that. Now, to my understanding, the revenue from these videos is going to go towards the person who actually uploaded the original video, and the revenue information will be private to all the collaborators. But if you, for example, made a deal with a sponsor and that sponsor paid everybody to make that video, then that's one way that the revenue could be divvied up. Or if it's a business partnership between multiple people, it could be pretty useful. Now, this next change is really cool. This is something that you used to have to pay hundreds of dollars per month to an external tool to even be able to kind of do this, and that is being able to lip sync your videos to translated audio. So if you have somebody talking in your videos and you use YouTube's built-in translation feature to translate it, you could always tell it was translated because obviously the person's lips and the person's mouth wouldn't match with what the person was saying in another language. That all changes now. It'll actually be lip synced with AI to actually match what they're saying in another language. So you could watch YouTube videos and have no idea, for example, that the person running the channel is in a different language. Of course, it will say it was dubbed by YouTube, but if you just watch the video by itself, you would have no idea. So personally, I think you definitely should use this and you should be translating your videos if you're running an entertainment channel that is applicable across the languages that you're translating into. Instead of creating multiple different channels like I've done in the past, I've had channels that have gotten nearly a million subscribers that are literally just translated versions of my English channels. But the thing is, I had to pay so much money for people to dub all those videos. But now this changes all of that. It's built directly into YouTube, even if you're a personal brand. But I know a lot of people are running faceless channels if they're watching my channel. And the best languages to typically translate into would be Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Arabic, and Japanese. This is due to the fact that some of these languages like Spanish, for example, have super high view counts. In fact, I get more views on my Spanish versions of channels than English ones oftentimes. However, languages like Korean or Japanese will get you a much higher CPM due to the fact that those countries have very high ad rates from what I've seen. So do this if you're an entertainment channel, but if you're running an educational channel like I recommend here, I personally wouldn't mess with translations too much, especially if you're selling something from your channel because that thing isn't going to be applicable to people in multiple different languages if you're, for example, just have your sales page in one language like most of us do. If we're selling a course, if we're selling a software or something and that software is only sold in English and we're selling that as an affiliate, but then all of our content's translated into 50 languages, it doesn't make sense as much in my opinion. So there's nuances to it. I would use it if you're running an entertainment channel, but other than that, I personally am not using it too much for my educational channels like this one right here. Now also there's a change to YouTube livestreams. This honestly doesn't apply to me that much. I don't really do any livestreams on YouTube, but basically they allow you to practice and perfect a stream before you actually go live. And then you can use these practice streams to basically turn into drafts for actual YouTube videos. Kind of cool if you do livestreaming. Other than that, not too useful to me. And now this next change is super important to faceless YouTube creators because it goes to a point that I've really been trying to stress hard on this channel. Which is that you should be creating content that cannot be easily commoditized because AI is going to commoditize the easiest types of content first. So the way you protect yourself is building what I like to call brand IP with your channel by having an avatar be the face of your channel. It doesn't have to be an actual person. Like for example, there's channels like Yellow Dude, which is literally just a yellow AI avatar guy who does fitness tutorials, and they get millions upon millions of views a month. And this next change is really important to know, and that is the expansion of YouTube's likeness detection tool to all YouTube program creators. So everybody on YouTube will have access to this if they're part of the YouTube Partner Program, and it allows people to not only remove unauthorized content if you see people reuploading your videos— and you might say, that's great, I can get rid of copycats, whatever. Sometimes you might not even care that much if people reupload. Personally, I don't really care that much, but here's why this is important. YouTube is clearly investing heavily into technology that can identify original versus derivative content. And as these systems become more advanced, they're going to get better and better at detecting creators who are just re-uploading other people's videos without adding any significant value. And this means the creators who are going to succeed are going to be the ones who go a little bit of that extra mile to build an AI avatar character or make very educational, great videos instead of just entertainment slop that's been produced 1,000 times before. And this really proves the point that I've really been trying to stress on this channel, which is to go for education instead of entertainment. That's where the money is. Create long-form content. If you do Shorts, link it to your long-form. Create brand IP. Have something or somebody be the character of your channel. And that way, even if somebody steals your character or they use it, they're just building up that character even more, which helps you even more. Let's say you had a random faceless, you know, top 10 channel, and if somebody steals your content, reuploads it, doesn't really help you at all because you're just posting commoditized stuff that anybody could have made. That, that's how I got my start on YouTube. I'm super happy that, you know, that allowed me to get to the point of making tons of money, being able to never work a 9-to-5 job or anything. But that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to YouTube. There is so much more potential, and I've made infinitely more by selling stuff from my channels and providing real educational value, as is the case to this channel as well. Due to the fact that I'm the personality behind this channel and I'm sharing my experience and knowledge I've gained over my past decade on YouTube. Hopefully you can find it valuable and we're building a real connection through these videos as a result. And that connection could lead to us creating a huge business together down the line. Who knows where it could lead? But that would have never happened if I was just uploading those same exact entertainment style channels that did get me, you know, Gold Play Button for getting a million subscribers. But it's very limited in the scope of it. So In my opinion, this new change by YouTube just reinforces this. Now YouTube just also announced a change for podcasters who create podcast clips to basically create clips from those podcasts and create Shorts from them from their full episodes. Now even if you don't have a podcast, it does show where YouTube priorities are heading, which is that the extremes are becoming more successful on YouTube. Some people love short-form content, some people have super low attention spans, they just want to scroll through that all day. Those are very low-intent viewers. They're not going to be someone who necessarily wants to buy something immediately from a short. Maybe they do, but it's very rare, and they probably won't spend as much money as somebody who is more into the long-form content, who might, you know, watch a multiple-hour podcast episode, who watches tutorials just like this one. And maybe we'll do business together one day because you watch the content, hopefully get a ton of value from it. Maybe you go in the description, you book a call— shameless plug for Tube Accelerator, my program— which will actually help you run your channel and everything and make sure you're doing everything correctly. But long-form content is where it's at, in my opinion, to really monetize monetizing to the next level and giving more value. But just understand that these two extremes of content are successful in different ways. Shorts are very successful for getting tons of views. You can get play buttons and everything else. However, long-form content is worlds better for monetizing and actually making money from your channel. And most of the people who watch this channel, their priority is actually building a business and giving a lot of value. So I would recommend them to go for more long-form content. If you do both, use the Shorts as a feeder to the long-form content. So use the new A/B split testing feature for your titles if you have it now. If you don't, you'll have it very soon. Check your email inbox. If you don't have your email attached to your channel, make sure to do that. Put it in the description of your channel so sponsors can reach out if they'd like to sponsor your channel. And now you can sell these swappable sponsor blocks, which is pretty cool. Translate your videos if you're running an entertainment channel. If you're doing an educational channel, I'd wait on it. Create content where you have an avatar be the face of your channel, or even just do it yourself as well. I'm only saying that because a lot of my channels into faceless channels, so I'm just speaking to everybody running those faceless channels. I run a bunch of them as well. and I'm trying to transition them to be more brand-based. Feel free to use AI only if it actually provides value to your end viewer. And keep in mind, I also run an AI company which also allows you to generate AI long-form YouTube videos from scratch, but it's only applicable to some types of content. So for example, if you're running a stock footage-based channel, that's perfect for it, and that's the exact type of content that it can produce. But you really should be either writing your own scripts or using another tool like my other tool, TubeMagic, that will actually allow you to put in context videos to generate incredible scripts that actually provide a lot of value because it's trained on what actually goes viral on YouTube and it's trained on all of the best practices for retention techniques, the best hooks and everything else. And then just focus on super long videos on your channel. If you can't think of how to do a long video, consider making a compilation of videos you already have on your channel. Make like an ultimate guide type of video where you can piece them together in a cohesive way. Do that every now and then. Those videos will do incredibly good because they'll get tons of watch time. Make sure to sell something from your channels. Direct people to a very long video on your channel that then sells something at the end of it, which I like to call your pillar flywheel money video. And the creators that do all of these things that I mentioned will have an actual strategy for doing YouTube instead of just guessing like most people do. And if you really want that absolute best strategy, then check out this video right here, which will show you a complete guide for doing YouTube step by step in a new way of doing YouTube in 2025 that nobody's talking about right now. So check out this video right here. It will show you that strategy. Hopefully I'll see you there. My name is Matt Parr. Hope you got a ton of value from this regardless, and I'll see you there.